Following those investments, the founders of Fundrise established a real estate development entity, Rise Development. In January 2013, Rise Development won an RFP over four other firms to utilize Fundrise in capitalizing a 10,000 s.f. urban redevelopment project. They also plan to use an idea-based crowdsourcing tool, known as Popularise, created by the same owners as Fundrise, to involve the community in the project’s development. How triple bottom line this project will be remains to be seen, as Popularise has also been used as a tool to crowdsource chain tenants in a strip mall anchored by Wal-Mart, obviously not an example of triple-bottom-line development.

Where will this all lead? Once the JOBS Act passed by Congress in April 2012 is written into finance law by the SEC, expect to see crowd-investment of real estate development start to become mainstream by the end of this year.